Chapter 49
At the very moment Dang Yulin was giving the masked man a thorough beating.
"Kek..! Kekh!"
Not far from the battlefield, someone was choking on their own breath.
Criiik-!
The man who had been wearing a mask on his face tore at it in frantic haste.
Even though fresh air wrapped around him, he still couldn’t draw a proper breath.
Grip-!
The black whip coiled around his throat tightened with even greater force.
"P-please... j-just...!"
With one hand he clutched the whip, while the other flailed wildly at empty air.
The man turned his head with difficulty and glanced back over his shoulder.
The men stationed at Chilseongsan always worked in pairs, and the masked man Dang Yulin was fighting was no exception.
In other words, besides the one hacking away at throwing knives with his broadsword, there was another masked man as well.
The one now on his knees on the ground, wheezing for air, was that second man.
He had stepped away for a moment to patrol the surroundings before she launched her opening knife attack, and that was when he heard the shrill scrape of metal.
He ran toward the sound, only to find the colleague he had been standing guard with fighting some little thing.
He didn’t really understand what the hell was going on, but since the opponent’s back was exposed, he figured he’d swing in and strike from behind.
That was when a voice came from behind him as he quietly drew his sword.
"Such behavior is unacceptable."
Whirrr—! Snap!
Startled, he whipped around and slashed backward, but the whip, faster than his reaction, wrapped around his wrist and shattered it.
Then, like a snake, it climbed his arm and strangled his throat, leaving him in this pathetic state.
It had happened so fast that he hadn’t even seen it properly.
"If you stay still, you won’t lose your life."
"I-I’ll stay still... please."
"I’m sorry, but that isn’t possible."
The whip-wielder’s eyes were utterly devoid of emotion, and though the man pleaded in a voice that was almost heartbreaking to hear, she didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow.
Hayoung pulled back on the whip’s handle.
"Aaaagh....!"
"Please be quiet. If you continue to be an irritation, I will kill you immediately."
Her voice held no rise or fall, but the certainty that she meant to end him if necessary came through even more clearly.
After warning the man, she quietly looked ahead.
Hayoung, who had been trailing after Dang Yulin at a distance, spotted a bug.
Even for the Tang Clan, which spent its entire life handling poisonous creatures like venomous snakes, poison frogs, insects, and herbs, there was no way she could sit back and watch some trifling little pest harm that young lady.
Then, just as Dang Yulin’s throwing knife arts were repeatedly blocked and she was pushed onto the defensive, her expression suddenly changed.
At that exact moment, the masked man spat up blood and dropped to his knees.
"It’s over. It looks like it was handled well."
Hayoung, who had served close at hand for a long time, immediately understood what had happened.
The trick had landed beautifully — she had coated the throwing knives with poison powder.
The tide had completely turned.
"I’m glad there was no need for me to step in."
Hayoung nodded.
She had been ready to move if things had gone wrong, but it had all been needless worry.
"Then I’ll finish you too."
She had been keeping him alive to gain some real combat experience, but there was no need for that anymore.
"W-wha—!? That’s not what you said befor—"
The man went pale at her sudden change in attitude.
"I’ve never made a promise to a bandit."
"We’re not bandits—urgh!"
Crack—!!
Along with the sound of a branch snapping, the man’s neck bent at an unnatural angle.
He had just said he wasn’t a bandit, but that was hardly relevant.
All that mattered to her was that this man had tried to harm Dang Yulin.
"Young Lady Yulin is moving. We’ll follow her."
"Ah, okay..."
At Hayoung’s words, Dang Seorin, who had been hiding quietly behind a tree, slowly revealed herself.
Of all things, her stealth was so absurdly refined that the masked man never noticed her until the very end.
* * *
Inside the workshop-cum-hut.
O Naho, fussing over the eagle sculpture, rolled his eyes quietly.
Swish, swish—
He moved the brush to apply lubricant for the feathers’ sheen, but his ears remained pricked open.
"Damn it, who the hell..."
"Judging by their approach, they’re coming this way."
The murmuring voices of the men outside the hut drifted in clearly.
From the scraps of conversation he caught, it seemed someone had entered Chilseongsan.
And not just entered — they were killing the bastards as they came!
Yes! Yes!
O Naho cheered inwardly.
He knew it instinctively.
The one coming now was the person he had called for.
What kind of nonsense was that?
Somebody coming all this way just to see him?
Lia-rudol O Naho, age sixty-five.
Was this the late-blooming delusion of a man who had never even gotten a crush as a teenager fifty years ago finally arriving now?
Or had he gone insane from the extreme stress of the past month?
He was neither.
Nor had his brain gone bad just because he was acting ridiculous far too late in life.
On the contrary, his mind was working more sharply than ever.
The one coming here now was, in effect, a person he had summoned.
Before he began work, the masked men had made a sincere request — or rather, a thorough cudgeling.
-If things continue this way, complaints are going to come in from the clients. So let us send them a letter.
Of course, at first they had opposed sending any correspondence.
They wanted the job done as quietly and quickly as possible, not with letters and all that frozen nonsense.
The old man was clearly just stalling because he didn’t want to work, and fortunately they had a highly effective remedy: a club.
-W-wait..! At least hear me out first!
When the black, heavy rods were thrust toward him, O Naho, terrified out of his wits, poured out all the eloquence he could muster — no, his entire soul.
By his reputation, he had taken commissions from quite a large number of clients, and if he suddenly vanished without a word, it would be impossible not to draw attention.
For all his life he had built his name on speed and quality, so this sort of thing would be a terrible move.
At the very least, he argued, they should send an apology letter — and a notice of delayed delivery.
-Very well. But we’ll review the contents of the letter on our side.
The masked men accepted O Naho’s advice and sent the letters in his stead.
And so O Naho got to work, but there was something the masked men had overlooked.
-You’ve got to be kidding me. Why the hell are so many complaint letters still coming in!
The world did not, in fact, respond to an apology with a dignified nod and a polite, “I see.”
His workshop was here on Chilseongsan, but the main branch was over in Wuhan.
Whenever someone sent a letter, it went to the main branch.
And naturally, the masked men had also occupied that place, where they were driven half to death by the flood of complaints arriving every other day.
They couldn’t simply ignore the letters, because officials were mixed in among them.
Whether they liked it or not, those letters had to be answered.
No matter how much “officials are beyond harm” or whatever people said, what did that have to do with a sculpture shop?
You know what happens when you ignore an official’s letter in a medieval world?
Mind your behavior.
Writing letters under O Naho’s name just once or twice had been manageable, but after being worn down by dozens of replies, they finally forced him to write another one himself.
-Hello. I am Lia-rudol O Naho.
The second apology letter was sent out.
Maybe because it had a bit more detail than the first, which had been short and blunt, they finally got the message.
The complaints decreased compared to before.
They did decrease, but in exchange, the more civil clients dropped away, leaving only the truly vile ones behind.
-If you don’t send my commission right now, I’ll shit at your front door. (And the next day, someone really did shit in front of the main branch.)
-SenditSenditSenditSenditSendit (written in blood)...
The clients had become even more vicious, and the recipients of the letters were at their wit’s end.
When the masked men were considering a third apology letter, O Naho took a gamble.
He wrote their current location at the very end of the letter.
-...There.
-......
If that was discovered, then this time his entire body would truly be violated by thick, hard clubs of oak, but...
People naturally grow less cautious when the same behavior is repeated over and over.
-Huu... send it.
Worn out from dealing with those abusive clients, they sent the letter without checking it properly.
I asked for just one bastard to bite, and it actually happened!
Had he not seen all kinds of lunatics while doing this job?
By now he had encountered every sort of trash imaginable, and some had even chased him all the way to his own house.
In an era without customer service departments, those kinds of people were no joke.
If they walked all the way here on foot, they were bound to feel anger they never had before.
Old resentment plus new resentment equals the opening of hell’s gate.
He had hidden here on Chilseongsan to avoid those people, but now he prayed for one thing with all his heart.
O Naho was certain of it.
Those bastards will not let me live...!
Did it look like a bunch of secretive creeps would simply leave once their business was done?
There was only one thing men like that did when they left.
The method for beating a foul mouth that might go around blabbing inconvenient truths — murder to silence them.
So... hurry up and come already!
Honestly, if the client had come all the way here themselves, that meant they were already furious with him — but even that was better than those masked men.
Ki-woit, ki-woit—
As O Naho inserted the eyeballs into the eyes of the eagle sculpture and prayed desperately, a shout rang out beyond the hut door.
"Who the hell are you!?"
* * *
Not far from the hut.
"Stop right there!"
One of the ten masked men blocking the way stepped forward and shouted.
"Who the hell are you!?"
He leveled his spear at the green-haired girl walking toward him with a brazen, bobbing stride.
"Yulin."
The girl, who glanced at the spearhead gleaming with sharp light, answered briefly.
"...What business do you have here?"
The masked man swallowed.
Reports that were supposed to come up regularly from the foot of the mountain had stopped coming in some time ago.
After checking, they found the corpses of the men assigned below hidden in the brush.
They had all been murdered, and judging by the evidence, the culprit was the girl in front of him.
"I came to see the person inside that hut."
"No one may enter there without permission."
The masked men tightened their grip on their weapons.
"...So leave this place at once—"
"Is that so? I’ve got a pass."
"What?"
The masked men were taken aback for a moment.
Impossible.
There was no way anyone else had been sent from above...
"Wait just a second..."
"N-no, stop—!"
As she reached into her clothes, the masked man sensed something was off and tried to stop her, but it was too late.
"...Found it. My pass!"
She flung the small sphere she’d pulled from her pocket, and with a bang, a cloud of smoke burst outward.
Bang—!
"S-smoke bomb!"
"Everyone, be careful—agh!"
"Tch! This bitch is throwing hidden weapons!"
As a tiny glint flashed within the hazy smoke, a throwing knife buried itself in a vital point.
"My name is Yulin. The Yulin who will utterly ruin you."
Dang Yulin murmured, slipping throwing knives between the fingers of both hands.